Frugal Digital Innovation and Living Labs: A Case Study of Innovation in Public Health in India.

Addressing the need to theorize digital technologies and innovation processes, this paper focuses on how digital innovation can be contextualized in developing countries and made relevant to solve current development challenges. We draw on a current and long-term engagement in the innovation processes unfolding in a living lab established in the public health sector of rural India. Our object of analysis is innovations in the realm of digital technologies in relation to social development, in our case public health. The theoretical framework combines concepts of digital and frugal innovations to develop the notion of frugal digital innovation which emphasizes the need for building intersections between technical, social and institutional innovations. Particular attention is paid on how the material properties of digital technologies, including their ability to recombine, reuse, configure and integrate enable such frugal digital innovation processes. Another contribution of this paper is to understand "how" such innovation processes can be enabled, which we operationalize through the concept and principles of a living lab. Empirically, examples are provided of innovations that have been enabled through this lab. The paper thus makes two key contributions to IS research: one, develop the notion of frugal digital innovation, which has the potential of use in other innovation contexts; and, two, understanding how the living lab contributes to enabling such innovation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]